Nora Charles goes to rehab: making over Myrna Loy in The Best Years of Our Lives

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the gendering of alcohol consumption in The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946) using Myrna Loy’s performance as Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934) as an intertext. Wyler’s film, by constructing alcoholism as an exclusively male crisis, contributes to a wartime discourse on women and alcohol. This essay contends that, as Milly Stephenson in Best Years, Loy’s face and gestures become an interface through which this gender redefinition occurs – transforming a drinking companion into a caretaker. In Milly, Nora is repeated with a difference, updating Loy’s reputation as ‘the perfect wife,’ via the social act of drinking, for the post-war era.

KEYWORDS:

• Myrna Loy
• Nora Charles
• alcohol
• gender
• wife

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Drs. Leo Braudy, Tara McPherson, and Tania Modleski for their help in developing this paper; Tamar Altebarmakian and Nicholas Beck for reading early drafts; Sanders Bernstein and Eliot Dunn for reading late drafts; and Venice Senior High, my high school alma mater as well as Myrna Loy’s a century before. The statue in front of the school, called ‘Inspiration’ and modelled after Loy’s image in 1923 (both the original and the bronze replica installed in 2009), has kept me interested in the still extant cultural remains of her career.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Zachary M. Mann

Zachary M. Mann is a PhD Candidate at the University of Southern California. His work focuses on the intersections of literature, media, and histories of technology. His dissertation traces the co-evolutions of punch card technology and conceptions of authorship from the eighteenth century to today.